Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Back to Reality

Coming home from a vacation is both good and bad. It's good...no, great...to be with Keaton and Cyrus again. It's bad to have to join the real world again and go back to being responsible adults. After all the unpacking, laundry, mail-sorting, grocery restocking, cleaning, and picture sorting, it's time to get back to the blog and finish telling the rest of our story.

Let's see...we left off with a visit to Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Our next stop was in Flagstaff, Arizona. After the heat and red dust for days, it was so nice to enjoy some cooler temps and TREES! Yep...they had green trees! During our drive, we saw lots of bikers (the pedal kind, not the Harley kind) participating in a race. These bikers ride from California to the east coast in a week...usually riding for 22 hours per day. CRAZY! The hills they have to climb are unbelievable and my thighs burned just watching them.

We had to pose for a picture while at the Flagstaff KOA.
Keaton totally would have rolled his eyes at this and I'm sure he's so happy he wasn't with us
because we would have made him pose with us at the three-person sign!

We were up early to beat the other avid picture-takers to the Grand Canyon and arrived before the park officially opened. (I'm not a patient person and don't like to wait for people to move out of my way so I can take a picture. I have been known to use my elbows to keep others from encroaching on my prime picture-taking space.) The Grand Canyon was...what's the right word...grand. Really, it is gorgeous and really big. The colors are always changing with the sunlight.

Matt never once told me to take a step back!

While we were in Arizona, we were lucky to have some of my people come up from the Phoenix area and meet us in Sedona for lunch. It was so great to see them again and visit with them! After spending the afternoon with them, I can put to rest my theory of possibly being switched at birth. I definitely am a Marski through and through. Before we headed back to Flagstaff, Matt found this sign for Keaton. It's absolutely perfect! I'm hanging it in his room when we get home.

We visited the Petrified Forest National Park on our way over to Albuquerque. It was filled with sparkly logs full of crystals and the Painted Desert was beautiful. We enjoyed chili burgers at a diner in Albuquerque...hot chili peppers, not the beefy stew-like chili we eat in the winter. Matt didn't even break out in a sweat...but that was probably because he was all sweated out by that time after being in temps of 100 for days and days.

Next, we headed over to the Ozarks in Arkansas for the next leg of our journey. My dad and Sharon met us in Eureka Springs and spent a couple of days with us. The little town we stayed in was charming with its old Victorian architecture and many natural springs. It's just funny to see Victorian architecture when I was expecting old guys sitting in rocking chairs on their porches in their bib overalls, whittling wooden teeth. I have to admit I was a little disappointed not to hear 'Dueling Banjos' even once. (But, we did see some kind of outdoor wedding/ritual that involved robes and candles. Seriously.) The Ozarks were beautiful.

Matt makes fun of me because my hand is always on my hip.

So, it was another great vacation! We picked up three new states for our RV map...so that makes a total of 39 states we've visited in the RV. (We're up to 41 without the RV!) I'm still not a fan of country music, though...and there was a LOT of country music on the radio out west. We saw a gazillion interesting sites, had many laughs along the way (especially when I had one of my many blond moments) and even dealt with a few mishaps. Let's see...we had the Jeep overheat while four-wheeling and trying to vertically climb huge rocks in Moab; naughty kids threw something (apples?) off an overpass and had a direct hit to our roof on the RV while on the interstate in IL (luckily, there wasn't any damage); I lost a whole day of fun by catching some stomach bug and spent the day in bed sleeping and/or throwing up; we couldn't run the air in the Jeep since it would overheat after the Moab adventure, so we sweated off a few pounds (which I wouldn't exactly call a mishap!); we had some bloody noses and dry, peeling skin from lack of moisture out west; and I had a major freak-out in the Rockies. All in all, nothing serious and this only gives us some extra stories to share.

It's good to be home, but a little hard to get back in our routine. I'm looking forward to getting in our pool and just soaking. We definitely missed the water while out west. Oh, and Keaton and Cyrus too!

About Me

I'm Deb. I've been married to Matt for 27 fun and amazing years. I'm the creative dictator...uh, I mean director... of our home. We have one incredible son who is making his mark on the world. We love to travel, play, and enjoy the adventures in life. Our current adventure is remodeling our "new" house that was built in 1962. Wish us luck! ;-)